Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 16

The First Act

It has been an absolutely stunning couple of weeks, The first two in March, 2020, with the advent of the Coronavirus, (Covid-19). Storming across the world and settling in various countries and multiplying rapidly, it is the first really big pandemic in just over a hundred years, and we are woefully unprepared. No one knows how Many millions of people it will eventually infect and how many tens of thousands it will kill. But the government has acted predictably, spending trillions of dollars to shore up banks, hedge funds and the stock market. (We have just got to keep up those profits, no matter what!) For the rest of us, who will absorb the brunt of this deadly pandemic, we have been told by the people in power, that’s not their responsibility. It now has been said out loud and in exceptionally plain terms, the government only exists to promote the business aspects of our society.

This is merely a very chilling first act in an upcoming 50-year drama, the first scene in the final play of planet Earth, and everything that can go wrong, already has. Consider the next few disasters to come over the course of even a few years in the future. What are we going to do when our coastal cities start to flood? What are we going to do when the air starts to get more polluted and less breathable? What happens when the fish start to die in the oceans and it becomes less able to help oxygenate the planet. Here is a good one, what happens when the equatorial areas around the world become less habitable due to extreme temperatures? And where do a couple of billion people go to get away from the crop failures and resulting famine, less fresh water, war and more disease? Not to mention increasing storms, floods, drought, cold and heat waves, unpredictable conditions and just plain bad luck of being in the wrong place at the right time? Do we just give up on the environment and say, too bad for all the animals?

And how are we going to pay for all of this? Our little pandemic is predicted to cost many billions and billions of dollars and with the government giving away all the money in corporate subsidies and welfare to the the stock market and banks, I don’t hold out hope for any help for ordinary people. This is just the first of what will probably become a series of pandemics over the next 50 years, but I am sure that we will not learn any lessons from it. We will just stagger from economic shock to the next economic shock. How much do you think it is going to cost to wall off all those flooding coastal cities, most of them the biggest ones in the various countries of the world? Got to protect those cities and the banks and businesses there, but who cares about the people, they can move someplace else. Of course the people living elsewhere will not be very hospitable to those diseased billions of climate refugees and a great deal of conflict will occur. So the first act is now underway, sit back and grab some popcorn, the rest of the play should be very entertaining.

(in just a couple of weeks, the major cities of the world have basically become ghost towns as all the people quarantine themselves from a virus that cannot be seen unless you use a microscope.)

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Attack of the Moon

Surely one of the strangest incidents of the early Cold War occurred in 1960. On October fifth, The North American Aerospace Defense Command, (NORAD), which tracks everything that flies around near U.S. airspace, received word from a early-warning radar station in Thule, Greenland. It indicated that a massive Soviet Union missile attack, directed towards the United States, was without a doubt, well underway. The U.S. was just building a series of new radar stations, called the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, (BMEWS). The network was composed of 12 radar sites which started construction in 1958. Since the shortest route to the U.S. from the Soviet Union was over the north pole, the radar stations were built in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Early versions of these stations, called the Distant Early Warning line (DEW line), could only track bombers, but with the dangerous rise of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the sites had to be upgraded.

Nuclear ballistic missiles were, of course, much faster then bombers, so in case of an attack, every minute counted. And with only a 15 to 25 minute warning window of nuclear attack, everyone involved was understandingly concerned. Testing on the new BMEWS radar at Thule began in May of 1960 and the Initial Operational Capability (IOC) was at the end of September and then operational in October. They didn’t have long to wait before something happened. There are several versions of what occurred next after the initial radar warning occurred, some say the the situation was calmly handled and checks of the system were quickly made. Others say that there was a little bit more apprehension and panic at the thought that nuclear missiles were on their way. Fortunately for us, what the Thule radar was actually seeing, was the moon, our moon, rising over the horizon from the direction of the Soviet Union. In retrospect it was nice to know that our radar was very powerful and effective, and could see the distant moon. Very soon after, changes were made in the radar to disregard the moon in the future. When the system was designed, no one had anticipated this possibility until the radar started operation and was actually being used.

Nothing lasts forever and the Thule BMEWS radar system was deactivated in June, 1987. It was replaced by a Phased Array Radar, whatever that is. And while the whole incident, seen from our current day, appears amusing, what is not so funny is that missile warning systems in Russia are old and prone to fault. With Russian President Putin getting more aggressive, it does not give anyone much confidence in the fact that their old nuclear systems may be less then reliable. The Chinese do not even have a warning system and when they get around to building one, they will have bugs and other things to work out before it becomes entirely operational. Perhaps we should tell them about that little problem with the moon and radar.

(Thule’s system of BMEWS radar towers prior to being taken down in 2014, with the Danish government’s approval.)

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The Russkies

It is a less then polite term describing the Russian people that was actually coined during the Crimean War in 1853 but also used during the Cold War, I heard that term many times in my youth while growing up in the sixties. The Russkies I was told, were out to destroy our way of life and spread godless communism to all the free peoples of the world. And while I have detailed many of the crazy ways in recent blogs in which the U.S. was prepared to spy on and attack the Soviet Union, the Soviets were also looking for some unusual ways to do the same to us.

The MiG-105 was a test vehicle for a series of Soviet space planes under the Spiral project. Spiral space fighter planes were intended to ensure complete control over space and block any NATO launches out of the atmosphere. They would have taken off on top of a traditional solid rocket booster, complete their mission, and return to a base. The MiG-105 was successful in its early flights, making a variety of powered hops. However, by the late 1960s, Soviet leaders questioned whether a military space plane program was feasible. When it came down to it, space planes were too expensive for granting a small strategic advantage. The program ended in 1969.

The Soviets built the largest submarines in the world, Akula-class subs (called Typhoon) were constructed near the end of the Cold War, right before the fall of Soviet Union. Designed to carry as many missiles as the US Ohio-class submarine, they had to be large since the Soviet missiles were bigger than the American versions. The Typhoons were monsters of a submarine as they had to complete missions under the polar ice cap and to sustain the crew effectively through long, multi-month missions. Fortunately, they never saw combat and the end of the Cold War reduced the need for the subs.

In the 1960s, nuclear strategy revolved around long-distance, high-altitude jet bombers being able to penetrate enemy airspace to drop nuclear bombs. In the early 1960s, the United States began work on the XB-70 Valkyrie, a huge Mach-3 bomber that would be impossible to shoot down. Fearing a US bomber lead, the Soviets began working on their own Mach-3 bomber, the Sukhoi T-4. While on the ground and during takeoff, the nose of the plane drooped down to expose a forward-facing windshield. When the T-4 reached altitude and supersonic speeds, the nose raised and covered the windshield. With the nose raised, the pilot had to fly via a periscope that would stick out of the fuselage. The project ground to a halt a few years after the comparable American XB-70 stopped testing.

One of the strangest vehicles build by the Soviets was the Lun-class ekranoplan. It wasn’t quite a boat and it wasn’t quite an airplane, but was a bit of both. Roughly the length of a 747, the Lun-class carried six anti-ship missiles on top of the aircraft as well as four 23mm cannons. It had a top speed of 340 mph and cruised at 280 mph at about ten to fifteen feet above the water. They only built one and it was part of the Black Sea Fleet from 1987 until sometime in the 1990s.

In the 1960s, supported by USSR leader Nikita Khrushev, an underground tunneling vehicle was built, named the Combat Mole, it operated using nuclear power and was 35 meters long. It could travel at a maximum speed of 7 km/h and could also carry five crew members and up to 15 soldiers. First tested in 1964 in the Urals, it was very successful. The second test didn’t go well as the Mole exploded, killing all its crew members. The cause of the accident is unknown but all further tests were postponed and the project was later abandoned permanently.

(Okay, so the U.S. efforts to attack the Soviet Union don’t look quite so crazy when both countries are compared. But it was a time that I have happily put behind me now.)

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The Racetrack Option

Nuclear war is not amusing when it comes to your own backyard. At the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, in 1986, a new missile, the MX, (ironically nicknamed the Peacekeeper), was beginning to be deployed by the U.S. Air Force. Each missile contained 10 separate nuclear warheads that could be individually targeted. Where to put these deadly missiles was hotly debated. Regular fixed and hardened ground silos were thought to be unsafe, so a new idea was developed. Each one of the proposed 200 missiles would be placed on a 15-mile closed road loop with 23 bomb-proof shelters each separated by a distance not less then 7,000 feet to make sure that a single Soviet warhead could not destroy more then one shelter at a time. Periodically the missiles would be shuttled from one shelter to another within the loop in an elaborate and expensive shell game.

Where to put the 200 so-called ‘racetracks,’ was an easy choice, Nevada and Utah, (where I live), held millions of unoccupied acres of desert wilderness, so no one would mind if it was dug up for the MX shelters or destroyed in a nuclear exchange. The total deployment area would be some 45,000 square miles along with 10,000 miles of roads connecting the shelters. The construction would use scarce desert resources, depleting ground water reserves and closing large areas to public recreation and grazing for cattle ranchers. While regular people were somewhat receptive to the need to defend the country, the governors of Nevada and Utah along with the LDS Church and some U.S. senators, opposed the missile hiding idea. Eventually the scheme was discarded as being wasteful. Other suggestions were to put missiles in large boxcars and have them moved around on a small rail system in order to confuse the Russians. If needed, the missiles could also travel around the 200,000 miles of the regular U.S. rail system. The Peacekeeper Rail Garrison was started but never finished and in 1991, the project was canceled. The MX program had cost up to $20 billion by 1989 and produced 114 missiles at about $400 million for each one, and over $50 million for each warhead. By 2005 all had been decommissioned.

When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 the Cold War seemed to have ended. The $7 trillion dollar U.S. price tag now seems to have been wasted as most of the weapons systems developed to oppose the Communists are now long since obsolete. As we get further from those days of nuclear paranoia, it is hard to imagine the necessity of spending so much money to try to destroy someone else. However, with so many left-over nuclear weapons around the world now, it has become much more worrying that terrorists and other disaffected groups could possibly get and use these old weapons. So governments will continue to spend extravagant amounts of money for our continued protection. The process goes onward with absolutely no end in sight.

(The map shows where vast acres would be required to hide the 200 nuclear tipped missiles and one of the proposed shelters. Fortunately the project was never started and the need to rip up and desecrate the desert was left for the locals to do now.)

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Project Iceworm

In the frantic arms race of the Cold War, the U.S. looked for ways to get nuclear missiles closer to the Soviet Union since the early rocket boosters were not terribly reliable. As Canada did not want anything to do with housing nukes since that would make them a big target of the Russians, the U.S. looked for other options. During World War Two, the U.S. had worked with the Danish government to protect Greenland against German occupation and aggression by establishing radio and weather stations in the far north along coastal areas that could be supplied by ship. At the start of the cold war in 1951, the Air Force developed, in secret, a base at one of the former station sites at Thule on Northwest coast of Greenland, which, at its height, would house up to 10,000 people living there. In a monumental building effort, a year-round base was constructed to be able to station and refuel early nuclear bombers for patrolling flights around the arctic and near Russia.

In 1959 the airbase became a staging area of an extremely top secret nuclear missile base building project, 150 miles away up on the Greenland ice cap. The operation was code-named Project Iceworm and the site was called Camp Century. Its proposed scientific purpose was announced as research in ice construction methods, but unknown to the Danish government, it’s real purpose would be something quite different. The Air Force began to cut a series of 21 trenches that were covered with arched roofs under which prefabricated buildings were assembled. The structures contained a hospital, theater, church, shops and living quarters for the 200 men and the worlds first portable nuclear reactor, which supplied power for the base. The idea was to eventually carve out a 50,000 square mile network of launch control sites for short range nuclear missiles that would be hidden more then 30 feet below the surface of the ice. With a number of launch areas, the missiles could be moved around in an effort to keep their bombs safe from detection and destruction.

Unfortunately, the Greenland ice cap is actually a huge glacier, and glaciers move. Slowly over a few years, the tunnels and trenches began to shift and deform as the ice flowed at a much faster rate then anticipated. In 1964 the nuclear reactor had to be removed and a standby diesel generator took up the job of providing power. By 1966 it was clear that the experiment was not going to work and the camp was completely abandoned. After the Air Force left, it was assumed that the left-over infrastructure with its remaining human, chemical and radioactive waste would be covered by ice and snow and protected from being disturbed. Current warming trends in Greenland are expected to eventually uncover the base in the next 50 to 100 years along with the leftovers and contaminates, possibly disrupting and polluting the environment. One good thing came out of the whole experiment, the project produced a number of the first ice cores of the Greenland ice cap which have been of valuable use to climate scientists today.

(Below, Camp Century under construction. The idea might have worked except for natural forces, which are not often fully taken into account.)

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The Glomar Explorer

Since I have been on a Cold War kick lately, I thought I would look into one of the most outrageous events of that 40-year long ideological conflict involving no less then, the eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes, the Central Intelligence Agency, (CIA), and a sunken Russian nuclear missile submarine.

Starting in 1971, Global Marine Development Inc., a company owned by Howard Hughes, began construction on an $350 million dollar ocean-going mining ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer. It’s mission, at the time, as described by Hughes, was to extract minerals from the deep ocean floor. This was a developing notion then that the ocean floor could be mined, and everyone bought into the idea. But the deep-sea drilling platform was actually built for the CIA to recover the Soviet submarine, K-129. The sub had sunk due to an unknown accident in very deep water at 16,500 feet and was located some 1,560 Northwest of Hawaii. Since a large U.S. Naval salvage ship would be obvious, Hughes was used as a cover to build an innocent looking ship that could secretly recover the sub.

In 1974, code named Project Azorian, the mining ship had recovered a part of the K-129, but as the section was being lifted to the surface, a mechanical problem with the grapple caused the piece to break apart. Still, the remaining recovered section held two nuclear torpedoes, cryptographic machines and the bodies of six Soviet submariners, who were later reburied at sea. The submarines nuclear missiles and code books that were eagerly desired, were not in the parts of the ship that were recovered.

The facts of the project became public in 1975 but were neither confirmed of denied by the CIA. This tactic became known as the Glomar Response and in the years following, was used to counter all sorts of public and journalistic inquires including Freedom of Information Act requests. Unconfirmed reports that most of the sub had been eventually recovered were never verified. While the Glomar Explorer had a huge lifting capacity there was no interest in using it for anything else because of the great cost in operating the ship. It was mothballed for a while by the Navy and later upgraded and leased to other companies for deep ocean drilling projects. In 2015 it was retired and broken up for scrap in China.

(In true James Bond fashion, the bottom of the Glomar Explored opened to lower massive grappling claws, capable of bring up parts of a submarine and hiding it inside the ship. The bottom image is a fanciful CIA illustration of how the ship worked.)

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MOL

Growing up in the sixties I was fascinated by the American space program, I eagerly watched every launch of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft from 1961 to 1972. Little did I know at the time, that there was a parallel, and secret, second American space program.

At the start of the sixties, the Cold War was raging, with the Russians claiming that they would bury the U.S. under an onslaught of nuclear missiles. In order to verify this and to construct a suitable response they need good intelligence. Overflights of the Soviet Union by high flying photo reconnaissance aircraft, the U2s, were the only way to see inside the secretive state. This came to an end when a U2 was shot down in May, 1960 over Russia. Eager to continue their surveillance, the Air Force started constructing spy satellites, but the the rockets frequently failed during launch and photographic image quality was poor. In 1963 the Air Force announced the beginning of a program to construct a Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) for scientific space studies, but it was actually going to be used as a platform for orbital reconnaissance and spying. The single use labs would be launched on 40-day missions with large optics, cameras and side-looking radar, and the two-man crews would be returned to Earth in modified Gemini spacecraft.

Unknown to the public, 17 astronauts selected for the MOL program, trained in secret for almost six years, learning to work in space and to use the surveillance laboratory. Cost overruns and developmental problems kept the lab from flying with a crew, and a month before the first moon landing, the program was canceled. Advanced reconnaissance satellites had been developed that were much more reliable and had now replaced the idea of an expensive manned laboratory. All was not lost however, several of the highly trained astronauts eventually transferred to NASA and flew on space shuttle missions in the eighties. Also, six large, 72 inch mirrors, that were to be used in the orbiting labs for surveillance, were salvaged for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for the Multiple-Mirror Telescope in Arizona, where they are now used for exploring the cosmos.

(An artists rendering of how the MOL would look in orbit. The program cost one and a half billion dollars in mid-sixties money. The entire moon program cost some $25 billion from 1961 to 1972.)

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Spanish Flu

Since the rise of the new Coronavirus, now officially known as Covid-19, I thought I would look into previous pandemics as this new virus is thought to be working up to becoming a worldwide problem. As an amateur historian I thought that I knew something about the last really large influenza pandemic that occurred in 1918 to 1919, but it was much scarier then I thought.

Starting in the last year of World War I, the flu spread around the planet to infect as much as a fifth or more of the world’s population and kill 675,000 in the U.S. and 20 to 50 million people worldwide, much more then the combined casualties of the First World War. Those are pretty big numbers, but we are talking about the world in 1918. Then, there were no vaccines or antibiotics to help, and efforts to control the disease were uneven, depending on the level of a country’s medical infrastructure. Traditional methods were isolation and quarantine of the infected, using good personal hygiene, cleaning every thing in sight and stopping large public gatherings. It sounds a lot like what we are already doing in this modern day and age. In the 1918 pandemic, mortality was abnormally high in young adults, though the very young and very old suffered as well.

Just like today, there were media restrictions on reports of the severity of the disease. At that time it was due to the ongoing war effort. There were exceptions in neutral countries such as Spain, where reports of the effects were not censored. This contributed to the idea that the flu was particularly bad there, giving rise to the disease being called the Spanish Flu. And then, in less then two years after the worldwide effects had appeared, the flu abruptly slowed, perhaps due to the virus having mutated to a less infectious strain. Whatever it was, the world breathed a sigh of relief and added up the costs. Today, we are already starting to feel the effects of a slowing world. In our interconnected and interdependent world economy, will we be able to weather the storm to come if this picks up steam? Only time will tell.

(An emergency hospital on a Kansas military base. Crowded conditions in the military and in hospitals full of casualties from the war no doubt contributed to the spread of the flu.)

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SF Explosion

One of the really great things about this day and age is that it is a terrific time for Science Fiction. Back in the early sixties, there wasn’t a whole lot of choices you could stretch your imagination with. Fortunately the decade started out with one of the greatest SF anthology series ever made for television, The Twilight Zone. It’s success was followed a few years later with another SF series, The Outer Limits. Many of my young friends cut their SF teeth on the short lived Fireball XL5 and of course, The Jetsons and my favorite, Jonny Quest. In 1965, Lost in Space came out on TV and was a somewhat serious SF adventure for most of a season before falling off. I also remember a comedy SF series called, It’s About Time, around that period that I watched, hoping for more serious fare.

In 1966 my wishes were granted with the premier of Star Trek. The early episodes are well worth a watch again as there were many aspects of ship life and interactions between the crew which were gradually removed in later shows as being unimportant to the narrative. That same year there was another SF series, The Time Tunnel that was another show which took SF seriously at least for the first season. Later in the decade, The Invaders, pondered the aspects of an alien takeover of Earth and had some good dramatic moments. I did not watch the Land of the Giants which came out in 1968 and Fantastic Voyage, a short-lived TV series made from the movie of the same name. By the end of the decade I was off to college with little time to indulge my SF habit. After graduation I started working at a Planetarium as the staff artist and that brought me back in contact with SF enthusiasts.

These days there are so many shows that deal with SF and Fantasy, one hardly knows where to begin. Some of my recent favorites, (the last five years or so), was the first season of Dark Matter. The Expanse has impressed me with incredible visuals and a interesting story arc. Stranger Things has been a whole lot of fun to watch, and A Series of Unfortunate Events was great camp. The Umbrella Academy and Good Omens were interesting and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance was okay. Star Trek: Discovery was mostly good, I am just not sure if I can deal with all the human drama. Star Trek: Picard has been very good so far and of course, The Mandalorian has given us a better Star Wars then the last two movies have. There are a few dozen more shows that I want to look in to when I get the time, but it is a truly wonderful thing now to have so many interesting SF and Fantasy shows just waiting to be discovered.

(The Mandalorian has been a fun and interesting romp through the Star Wars universe, and how can you resist a cute, green, young Yoda-like creature sitting next to you.)

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Cold War, Hot Planet

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, the biggest fear that all of us young people had was the Red Menace and the Cold War. Our parents had just fought a hot war against fascism and now we were involved in a cold one, one which could rain atomic destruction down on our little school, (which is why we were taught to hide under our desks to protect ourselves). Being young, I could never figure out why we were in such danger from those big bad communists. Other then a different economic system and a hundred other oddities such as wearing furry hats and talking funny, why did they want to get rid of us and destroy our way of life? So I spent the first half of my adulthood worrying about nuclear war, like what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the world as we knew it. Imagine my relief when the evil Soviet Union economic system fell apart at the end of 1991. And imagine my surprise that the whole dustup in military spending cost some $8 trillion dollars.

Things became a little less worrying except for the usual ongoing threats; terrorist bombings, disease pandemics, earthquakes, floods, famines. Life was almost idyllic at the start of the new century, until an new and deadly concern began rearing it’s head, climate change. I quickly learned that once again we were facing a calamity of global proportions, threatening civilization itself once again. But now things were a bit different, we aren’t spending trillions of dollars to protect us from this dire danger. In fact, this potentially devastating threat to our planet was being ignored and dismissed as fake news. If anyone had said in the sixties or seventies that the communist threat was a hoax, they would have been put in jail as a red sympathizer or a pot-head peace-nik. Of course, it is all about money, the Cold War was good for business, very good. And climate change is not good for business, what do you think? They now want everyone to use renewables and change our entire structure of the global energy distribution network, which would cost many, many trillions of dollars and turn the worldwide balance of power upside down. And we can’t have that, lose money or destroy the planet, what nonsense, it’s all fake, lies, hoax, and we will persecute you if you try to say we aren’t telling the truth to the public. And for God’s sake, don’t buy one of those electric cars or put solar panels on your roof, you no good pot-head peace-nik.

(Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson has the largest airplane boneyard in the world. Their typical inventory comprises more than 4,400 aircraft, mostly from the cold war, which makes it the largest aircraft storage and preservation facility in the world. But hey, we shouldn’t be wasting money on climate change.)

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